Conventional cooling equipment used for cooling electronic devices are relatively inefficient. In some cases, the power consumed by the cooling equipment to cool electronic devices is greater than the power used to operate the electronic devices.
To cool relatively high concentrations of electronic devices, such as computer servers mounted in racks provided in a room, air conditioning units have typically been employed. Such air conditioning units are often located relatively far away from the room in which the racks of computer servers are located. In some arrangements, the server racks are positioned on a raised floor that is above a plenum into which is provided a flow of cold air driven by fans of the air conditioning units. The cold air flows from the plenum through perforated tiles on the raised floor for delivery into the room that houses the server racks. The cooling solution described above is typically inefficient, since the cold air has to be moved relatively large distances between the air conditioning units and the room in which the server racks are located. Moreover, the fans that are used to move the air from the air conditioning units to the server racks can consume relatively large amounts of power.
Alternative cooling solutions have been proposed in which server racks are arranged such that the server racks separate cold aisles from hot aisles. Air in the hot aisles are cooled using cooling equipment, with the cooled air then provided to the cold aisles for delivery to electronic devices located in the server racks. However, the conventional equipment used in such hot aisle/cold aisle solutions also tend to suffer from various inefficiencies.